Catherine Wagley

Catherine Wagley writes about visual culture and art in Los Angeles. She regularly contributes to the L.A. Weekly and is a columnist for the Art21 Blog as well as Daily Serving. Her writing has also appeared in Photograph Magazine, Sculpture Mag, ..might be good, Intelligent Life and a number of other arts and culture publications.

From this Author

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A column by Catherine Wagley Thanksgiving is not the time of year you realize you disagree with the people you love, but it often is the time you suddenly decide you want to pick the fights you’d usually avoid. My sister called yesterday from Washington, where she was with one branch of the family. She described a dinner[…..]

This post was originally written for Art21.org and published on October 25, 2012. When photographer Laura London’s show opened at Coagula Curatorial in Chinatown last month, it was called Once Upon a Time…Axl Rose was my Neighbor. By the time it closed on October 20, its title had been cut down to just Once Upon a Time… and all direct reference to Axl Rose, famous[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A column by Catherine Wagley I was slapped by a child named Sam who must have been 4 years old the last time I visited Friederich Kunath’s show Lacan’s Haircut at Blum & Poe. Sam was playing with his sister on the bright yellow carpet in the first gallery — each subsequent gallery has bright carpet too, orange[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley This following L.A. Expanded column was originally published on March 9th, 2012. Do you remember track star Gail Devers, with her absurdly long nails? I noticed her for the first time in Atlanta, on television during the 1996 Olympics, where she one her third gold. Then, her nails were painted gold to[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A column by Catherine Wagley When LACMA curator Stephanie Barron arrived in the galleries of the museum’s new Ken Price (1935-2012) retrospective yesterday morning, she saw three women bent over trying to get a look underneath Price’s sculpture The Hunchback of Venice. The sculpture is one of the first you see when you enter the show. “Apparently, they[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A column by Catherine Wagley Tobias Wolff and a friend went to a free showing of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light one evening in 1970. Shown in the sanctuary of an Oxford church, the severe narrative about spiritual malaise seemed hauntingly appropriate and, in a 2008 essay, Wolff describes his experience with it as “harrowing”—he felt himself drowning in[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley David Batchelor, in his exquisite little pink book Chromophobia, describes a white he encountered on the walls of the home of an “Anglo-American art collector” he visited in the 1990s. He wrote, “There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and this is that kind of[…..]